Book of Texas Bays

By Jim Blackburn; Photography by Jim Olive

Publication Year: 2004

In a dazzling tribute to the Texas coast, conservationist and lawyer Jim Blackburn has teamed with photographer Jim Olive to give us the most intimate and important portrait yet of Texas bays and of those who work for their wise use and preservation. While giving life and sustenance to plants, animals, and people, the bays and estuaries of Texas have other stories to tell—about freshwater inflows, deep port construction, disappearing oyster beds, beach resorts, industrial pollution, and more. At a certain point, each story brings opposing forces into the courtroom for vigorous debates on the future of some of our most valuable and irreplaceable resources.
The Book of Texas Bays is a personal account of legal battles won and lost, but it is also a fine work of natural history by someone who has a deep spiritual connection to the Texas coast and all it has to offer. Jim Olive’s stunning photographs present us with a dramatic perspective of our relationship with the Gulf and remind us of both the grandness and the fragility of our coastal treasures.

Contents

Acknowledgments

This celebration of Texas bays reflects the help of many
people. It was conceived out of discussions I had with Ann Hamilton
of the Houston Endowment, whose support was essential. Without
Ann’s conviction, this book would not have come to be. ...

1. Spirit of the Mud

Over the years, I have developed a spiritual connection with the coast and I act
to protect it. Place is where you are, your anthropological, ecological, and geological
center. If we understand place, we are more likely to care for it. Place may be the most
important concept in environmental protection today. ...

2. Water and Sabine Lake

The project was simple enough. The Sabine River Authority and Texas Water
Development Board wanted to know if the citizens of the Sabine Lake watershed
would object to selling water stored in Toledo Bend Reservoir to the City of
Houston. Toledo Bend had been built on the Sabine River in the 1960s. ...

3. Wetlands of the Upper Texas Coast

I prefer to experience the wetlands of the Texas
coast in my kayak. That way I can glide quietly along the marsh
edge, almost touching the Spartina grass as it rises from the lifegiving
mud of the bay bottom, passing the wading birds as they probe
the mud with their varied beaks, searching for food. ...

4. Smith Point

As one of the world’s leaders in ecotourism, Victor
Emanuel can go wherever he wants to watch birds: to Africa for the
southern carmine bee-eater; to Antarctica for albatrosses, petrels,
and shearwaters; to Brazil, where his tour leaders regularly spot more
than a thousand species on an eight-day trip. ...

5. Wallisville

For a little town that saw its heyday a century ago,
Wallisville is a place with a lot of resonance among Houston environmentalists.
The fight over the Wallisville Reservoir was one of the
longest, most serious environmental disputes on the Texas coast. The
original proposal was to construct a dam where the Trinity River
runs into Trinity Bay, ...

6. The Houston Ship Channel

The Reverend Carla Valentine Pryne (then Carla V.
Berkedal) gaped silently as we slowed to a crawl above the Houston
Ship Channel late one night, inching over the Beltway 8 Bridge connecting
Channelview to the north with Deer Park to the south, east
of downtown Houston. ...

7. Galveston Bay and Bayport

Walter Duson taught several of us about sailing. He grew up in El Campo and
spent much of his youth on Matagorda Bay and its tributary Carancua Bay, where
his family had a house at El Campo Beach. Like many others, he moved to Houston
for work, in his case as an architect. And like many others in Houston, he
looked to Galveston Bay for recreation, ...

8. Galveston Island

Houston is a town filled with geologists. The main
reason, of course, is the oil business. Many of them expend their
professional attention on using modern technology to find hydrocarbon
deposits. Others of a more academic turn of mind, like my friend
H. C. Clark concern themselves with geologic processes ...

9. Christmas Bay

West Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico at San Luis Pass,
a resort for birds at low tide. The flocks of birds blanket the flats in
a patterned fabric of black, white, brown, and gray—avocets and
stilts, willets and dowitchers. The tides work the silt into a textured
surface, rippled and sparkling in the sun. ...

10. Lake Jackson and the Columbia Bottomlands

We were present for a status conference. I explained that I had
filed suit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on behalf of
Sharron Stewart of Lake Jackson, the Houston Audubon Society,
and the Sierra Club to protect the Columbia Bottomlands along the Brazos and
San Bernard rivers where they reach the coast. ...

11. Sargent

The people who called me were Muriel and Roy Tipps,
commercial fishermen who own a bait camp and shrimping business
in Sargent on the north end of East Matagorda Bay. The U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers was dumping fill into East Matagorda Bay, and
the shrimpers couldn’t shrimp and the recreational fishermen couldn’t
fish. ...

12. Matagorda Bay

Al Garrison oriented the boat carefully as we approached
the locks on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. We were on the east
side of the Colorado River near the community of Matagorda. A
barge loaded with benzene was approaching from the other direction,
requiring careful maneuvering at close quarters. ...

13. Mad Island

Clive Runnells sat across from me at the conference
table in his Houston office as he talked about Mad Island, a tract of
coastal marsh that he inherited from Shanghai Pierce and eventually
conveyed to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Nature
Conservancy. Runnells was not raised on the Texas coast but
moved here in the early 1950s, ...

14. Palacios

Joe Nguyen called our office in June of 2000, asking for
help concerning the new shrimping regulations proposed by the Texas
Parks and Wildlife Department. He and the other shrimpers along
the coast were concerned that these regulations would put them out
of business, and their fears seemed well placed. ...

15. Lavaca Bay and Formosa Plastics

Diane Wilson is a shrimper from Seadrift, and she is
larger than life. I imagine her as a kind of colossus, standing with
one foot in San Antonio Bay and the other in Matagorda Bay, rising
over the Calhoun County peninsula, arms lifted, fighting off those
who would harm these bays. ...

16. Port O’Connor

Early June: Port O’Connor was abuzz with noise and
energy. Boats on trailers were lined up at the boat ramps, thirty or
more strung out along the road before dawn, trucks and SUVs with
their engines thrumming, waiting to deliver their two-hundred-horsepower
tunnel-hulled flat-water fishing boats into the intracoastal
canal, where Matagorda Bay meets Espiritu Santo. ...

17. San Antonio Bay and Sustainability

You could feel the tension in the large conference
room at One O’Connor Plaza in Victoria. The owners of the D. M.
O’Connor Ranches had called a meeting to discuss the diversion of
water from the Guadalupe River to the city of San Antonio. The
Guadalupe–Blanco River Authority (GBRA), San Antonio River Authority
(SARA), and San Antonio Water System (SAWS) ...

18. Rockport

Aransas and Copano bays are blue-green jewels set in
the bend of the Texas coast, where the coastline completes its transition
to a north-south alignment. This is where the bays become much
clearer, where seagrasses begin to be found in quantity, where the
redhead ducks winter. ...

19. Port Aransas and Lighthouse Lakes

Off the isthmus between the mainland town of Aransas
Pass and the island community of Port Aransas is a place called
Harbor Island, site of one of the biggest environmental fights ever to
take place on the Texas coast. The people defending the coast won
this one, which is why the Lighthouse Lights Paddle Trail now offers
access to one side of Harbor Island. ...

20. Nueces Bay

The lower coast of Texas is much drier than the
upper coast. The lower coast receives much less rainfall, and the
large rivers—the Sabine, Trinity, Brazos, Colorado, and Guadalupe—
all flow into the upper and midcoastal bays. South of San Antonio
Bay, freshwater inflow is greatly reduced compared to what flows
into the bays farther north. ...

21. Corpus Christi and Development

“Good morning, it’s Moseley,” came from the other end
of the phone line, and I knew the call was going to be interesting.
The caller was Joe Moseley, the brightest coastal engineer I know.
Moseley usually has several interesting tidbits of information and
often tries to get me involved in schemes that I need to consider
carefully before saying yes. ...

22. The King Ranch

We met our tour guide, Tom Langschied, in the
parking lot of our motel in Kingsville at 6:00 A.M. in late March.
Seven friends scurried to get gear together—John and Princie, Jack
and Sue, Dale Cordray, Garland and I—none of us wanting to be the
one keeping the others waiting. ...

23. Port Mansfield

Dick Morrison and I worked together when the
Galveston Bay Foundation was formed in late 1986 and have been
friends ever since. His son Richard was an associate in my law firm,
a young man who wanted to protect the environment as a lawyer.
The three of us were headed down the coast from Houston to Port
Mansfield to fish, talking all the way. ...

24. Laguna Atascosa

Gib Little cut the motor and coasted to the edge of
the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and into a small side bay, shallow
and full of seagrass. The shoalgrass glistened in the early morning
sun, the underwater meadow revealed in the clear water of the lower
Laguna Madre. The key to fly fishing for reds is to be quiet and
observant. ...

25. South Padre Island and South Bay

The spring morning had dawned windy and cloudy
with intermittent light rain moving across the island. Merriwood
Ferguson, an environmental activist and excellent birdwatcher, was
taking Garland and me birding on South Padre, and she thought we
might have a fall-out in progress; spring migrants often piled into
the island on days like this. ...

26. The Rio Grande

At the start of the twenty-first century, the Rio Grande
quit flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. A sandbar formed, separating
the river from the Gulf, and its flow stopped. No one meant for it to
dry up. It just happened. Water officials in the Rio Grande Valley
tried to fix it by dredging the mouth open, but the river silted in
again. ...

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